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If Kevin Kruse, a social-media-active history professor at Princeton, has it right, fear featured prominently in this exchange between Trump’s acting budget chief, Russell Vought, and Democratic congressman Albio Sires of New Jersey:

Watch this.

Administration officials are apparently so terrified of incurring Trump’s wrath they can’t even acknowledge basic facts if they make Obama look good. https://t.co/rsx74yrUce

This is what Vought came up with when asked a straightforward question about jobs growth under President Barack Obama: “My recollection is that under the Obama administration, we lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs.”

Sires, who fired back that he wasn’t asking about the manufacturing sector, would later tweet of Vought’s unwillingness to answer his question that “this is not disagreeing on policy [but instead] ignoring facts that don’t suit you.”

Another statistic that’s been floating around lately shows that, according to Labor Department figures, 1.5 million fewer jobs were created in Trump’s first three years in office than during the final three years of Obama’s presidency.

“Jobs were created, growth was there by the end of the Obama administration, and I [have] to put up with this nonsense that we somehow didn’t do anything to save this country,” the Cuban-born Sires told Vought.

Shawn Langlois

Shawn Langlois is an editor and writer for MarketWatch in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @slangwise.